The next day once again finds me soaking in the bath. It’s been too long since I’ve had a proper one, and, though I don’t actually have any road dirt on me due to the cleaning feature of my clothes, I still feel like I needed to get the residue of travel off me… How strange I’ve become.

  The big game with Viscount Monroe isn’t until tomorrow, leaving me plenty of time to relax. Which I of course don’t, but I suppose what I do is closer to it than I have done in a while.

  First, I sell all the medical herbs I grew last night for a tidy amount of coin. I did grow some syranthuse too, but I don’t sell that for the obvious reason of it being illegal to without a very hard to acquire license. Just the fact that I have some on me is astounding, since it’s notoriously hard to grow. The plant grower spell would definitely be one of my most effective spells to date just for the ability to grow it whenever I want.

  After selling the herbs to various vendors (the quantity is such that no single one is willing to buy all of it), I practice for the game tomorrow. I go from tavern to tavern, finding games to join, my clothes set to emulate what a low to mid-level merchant might wear.

  The games aren’t very exciting – just copper antes. The players aren’t anything interesting either. Hardly any of them are enhanced, and the ones who do have boons are only at basic. I make sure not to take too much from any table as I move from tavern to tavern. It’s not until I move up to a silver ante game that I find what I’m looking for – a cheat.

  It’s a man in his late twenties/early thirties with short black hair wearing dark clothes, save for a bright green scarf. Tall and lean with little muscle and a few short daggers secreted about his person.

  His cheating is fairly simple – just replacing cards in his sleeve. I let him get away with it, though I do try to mitigate my losses. I wait until he has his fill and leaves, then get up a moment later to follow him to the alley, where I find him trying to light some variety of rolled herb using a flint and steel contraption designed for the purpose.

  I mutter a quick cantrip, causing the roll to flare up, the flame settling on the tip in a blue blaze an instant later. He gives it a startled look, but snaps his head towards me when I speak a moment later. “Seven, three, nine.”

  “Um…pardon?” He says, slightly nervous at my revelation of being a mage.

  I shrug. “Sure, why not? I’m being generous today after all.” This confuses him more, so I repeat my opening statement. “Seven, three, nine. The cards you put in your sleeves.”

  He winces, but quickly recovers to take a cooler attitude, shrugging me off and scoffs. “What do you want, kid? To beat me up and get your coin back?”

  I chuckle and toss him a pouch full of silver. “No, I want you to show me how you did that thing with your fingers.”

  He laughs. “What? You think you’re a future shark or something?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t intend to cheat. I’ve just been invited to a high-stakes game, and I need to know what to watch out for on the off chance someone tries to pull something. So, the deal is: You show me the finger thing and every other way you know how to cheat, plus give me general game advice, and you get to walk away with that bag of silver.”

  He eyes the pouch, tossing it up and down to guess at the weight. “About five hundred raem?” I nod. “And what would you do if I just took it and ran?” With a flick of the wrist, the pouch vanishes and he spreads his hands out in a show-off manner.

  I will the multiguidance spell to shift targets to him and, drawing a knife with a flick of the wrist, throw the blade and pin his arm to the wall by his sleeve. I stare him in the eyes as I slowly walk up and retrieve the pouch from his sleeve, and then the knife. “Yes, that is the sort of thing I want you to show me. But don’t be obnoxious. Do I seem like someone you could steal from?” He stares silently at me and just shakes his head, barely moving it an inch. “Good. Now, either earn this, or direct me to a better cheat for a tenth of it.”

  He considers briefly, then tries to disarm me with a sudden wide smile. “Just a joke. No reason for alarm. I’ll take the first deal… Um… probably best done indoors. My place is nearby.”

  I examine his face for signs of a trap, but find no hope or ambition of a greater reward in his eyes. It seems that violent acquisition isn’t his flavour of crime, so I nod in agreement.

  His apartment is nice. Not up to my new standards of comfort, but everything is well maintained and clean. The windows even have glass, some of them at least, and provide a good amount of natural light.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “First,” he says, sitting at a chair (bare wood with no cushion) at his table, “I want to say I’m not a cheat… or at least I don’t cheat to make coin. It’s just something I do to fulfil a contract with one of the deceiver gods. I make my coin with real skill.”

  I nod in acknowledgement, deciding not to point out that he failed to win coin from me despite my not trying to beat him. “Your moral designation has been duly noted. Get on with the lesson.”

  “…Alright. Let’s start with what you saw me do.”

  He goes over a range of card switching techniques, then goes through several other methods that people use and how to spot them. Finally, he goes through legitimate strategies and hypothetical situations. When to pursue a hand and when to fold early, and other tips.

  “Alright. That’s about everything I cram into the time we have. Just make sure you do the practice tricks every day if you ever want to pull them off… Who’d you say invited you anyways?”

  “Oh, um… Viscount Monroe.”

  His face blanches at the name. “Are you kidding me? You’re going up against Monroe? You’re only a beginner!”

  I tilt my head quizzically. “You’re saying she has a reputation.”

  “Ha! I’d say! She’s one of the five best players in the capital!”

  “I see,” I say, “do you have any advice for playing against her then?”

  “Yeah! Don’t! She’ll eat you alive!”

  I raise a sceptical eyebrow. “I would like to point out that I wasn’t trying to win when I played you.”

  “Pfft. Yeah, sure. Why do you even need me then if you’re so much better than I am?”

  I shake my head. “Most of my ability is from boons. I needed theoretical knowledge to make it real skill.”

  “Well, at least you know your weaknesses. But fine. Let’s say you’re twice as good as I think you are. You still won’t win.”

  I shrug. “Well, I can hardly back out now. The game is tomorrow, and it’d be rude. So, if you don’t have any advice…”

  “Ok, ok, wait.” He inhales deeply and exhales slowly, puffing up his cheeks in thought. “Okay. Don’t try to beat Monroe. Find the sheep, and fleece them instead.”

  I raise a questioning eyebrow. “Sheep?”

  He nods. “Ok, so, invite games differ from tavern ones in that every player has been pre-selected by the host. Of course, the host isn’t going to invite anyone who will beat them; that would be silly. But they also aren’t going to invite a bunch of rubes and take all their money either. That would just make it so no one will come to their games anymore. So, they have to invite a mixture – sheep and wolves.

  “Everyone going to that game is thinking they’re the wolves – about half of them are wrong. Though to be fair, they might be wolves at other tables. The role of the sheep is to have their coin taken, and the role of wolves is to spread the resentment from the sheep and bond with the host over the experience of fleecing them. To feel grateful for the opportunity of hunting prey together.

  “So, what you have to do is identify the sheep and go after them while avoiding going after the wolves. Because fighting a wolf marks you as the wolf’s prey, and so the other wolves will go after you too. But going after the sheep marks as a wolf, and so the other wolves will leave you alone.”

  “…I see,” I say. “That makes sense, I suppose. How do I distinguish between sheep and wolves then?”

  He shrugs. “Start by looking for who’s afraid.”

  I raise a questioning eyebrow. “I don’t see how fear would make one prey. In fact, usually the easiest prey are the least fearful.”

  He shakes his head. “You misunderstand me. I’m telling you to identify the wolves by their fear. The sheep might fear the wolves, but that’s a momentary thing. Whereas the wolf fears the absence of sheep, which is a persisting condition only fully abated in the moment they clamp their jaws around the neck – thus transferring their fear to the sheep.”

  I just stare at him for a moment and shake my head, feeling a sort of hollow knot twist in my stomach at his metaphor. “I don’t think you’ve been around wolves or sheep very much,” I protest at his characterization.

  He chuckles. “And you’re saying that you’ve spent a lot of time around wolves?”

  “…I suppose not as such. Still, I don’t see how any of this helps. You said that the sheep will think themselves wolves, and have been wolves before. So, shouldn’t they be accustomed to wolfish thinking? Besides, your wolf and sheep metaphor originally described the relative skill of the players, whereas now you’re defining them in terms of… What? Personality traits? The two don’t seem correlated.”

  He stares at me blankly before shrugging. “You’re right. This is lousy advice. Don’t listen to it. Or rather, you can’t rely on it, not fully, but it is a pattern that tends to show up once play has begun. After five hands, you should be able to see the roles begin to set. Ten at the most.”

  “So what? I need to wait five hands before I do anything? That seems dangerous.”

  He nods. “Yes. Your first instinct will be to do nothing and watch, but of course, that will mark you as sheep. But you also can’t act too aggressively, as that will risk fighting a wolf, or worse, fail a hunt against a sheep. The latter will mark you as an inexperienced wolf, which is much the same as a sheep to the other wolves. Worse, because they will join forces to eliminate you before experience can be gained.”

  “…So what you’re saying is that your only advice is completely unactionable?”

  He shrugs with a laugh. “No, my first advice was not to go. But if you insist on going, finding the difference between the players is what you need to do. If it were easy, everyone would do it, which would make it hard, arriving back at where we are.”

  “…Fine. Whatever. I’ll take your strange advice in mind and see if it will somehow help. Anyways. You’ve been otherwise helpful. Enough to earn your silver at least. I’m going. We’ll probably never see each other again.”

  He nods. “Probably for the best. I don’t know if my clothes could survive another encounter.” He smirks as he gestures to the hole I put in his sleeve. “One last piece of advice though. Try to have fun, and don’t bet more than you can afford to lose.”

  I give a wolfish grin. “Once again, your advice is self-contradictory. What fun is there in betting prudently?”

  He leans his head back and laughs uproariously. “None whatsoever!”